User login

Draconic musings: a dragon's blog

I decided that as it is mostly just me around here I would feel slightly less silly talking to myself using a blog type format. Also while a lot of the stuff that I talk about here will be related to the Anargo Sector Project, not all of it will be, indeed I might well go off on entirely non-40k related tangents. As such keeping all of my random musings in a self-contained blog seemed like a good idea. Any big Anargo related articles will be posted to the forums or into the Sector Interface when they are completed but other stuff will remain here.

As you might have noticed one of my current little projects is uploading some of the old material from previous iterations of the Anargo Sector Project into the Archives.

Something else I've been working on for a little while, which is Anargo related in this case, is a detailed analysis of an Imperial hive city. The city in question is Tarvenhive, which will someday be a city on Tian, the sub-sector capital of the Merenas sub-sector and one of the key planets in the Anargo sector, and possibly the only true hiveworld in the sector. Tarvenhive is intended to be a typical example of an Imperial hive city and has a population of just under 1 billion. The city is roughly circular, about 100 km across and peaks at an altitude of 4.5 km in the centre, so it is a very wide, flat, cone with a profile similar to that of the Hawaiian volcanoes, though it does in fact cover a land area somewhat larger than the Big Island of Hawaii. The central 25 km forms the 'Hive Proper', and it is this region that is usually thought of when people refer to a hive city. The outer parts of the hive are essentially the same as a normal, albeit very large, city (I'm thinking of a population of about 160 million).

The first major infrastructural aspect I've been thinking about is transport. As you can imagine transport in a city of a billion is rather a large undertaking, particularly in the central regions where you need to work in 3D. I have had some thoughts about the central regions, primarily that in order to cover the 3D nature of the city properly it is going to need both horizontal train/metro systems at various levels throughout the structure, as well as some kind of vertical and/or diagonal equivalent. In terms of the details of the system, and maybe creating a map of it, I decided to look at the, on the face of it easier, task of the outer regions first, which are just a super-sized version of a big modern city like New York, Moscow or London. Even then though, if you want to have the same kind of density of rail systems as a New York, Moscow or London, expanding the combined urban rail and metro systems of any of those cities ends up with something like 4000-5000 stations and 8000-10000 route-km just in the outer regions of the hive! I think if I do create a rail map of the outer regions of the hive I'll just put on the lines rather than individual stations! Whenever I try and get my head around some aspect of a hive city like this it really just just serve to drive home just how vast these cities are.

Hmm, I would simply try to work with horizontal and vertical lines. Metros that travel up and down or forwards and backwards. The design of these vertical metros would be somewhat of a challenge. How would they work? Would people get out on various platforms or would they all climb up/down if they want to get in/out?

Or are we dealing with a different infrastructure system? Perhaps something akin to anti-grav vehicles or ever aircraft used to transport people and goods. Imagine vast airships inside this structure that function as busses or trucks?

You might be able to dig out a few ideas on the discussion me and Phil were having on Invictonburg, another Hive city, but under totally different circumstances though. Phil's musings on the Ecopolis are also rather interesting.

Horizontal and vertical lines was my main plan, I have toyed with the idea of diagonal lines either as well as or instead of the vertical ones, partly because the hive is much broader than it is tall. I've largely come back to the idea of largely horizontal and vertical lines though, maybe some slight deviations from exactly horizontal and vertical, but not much as it makes flooring in the vehicles easier! I've been a fair bit of thinking about it on and off actually, including how interchange, etc would work and I think I've got a decent vertical system concept. I should do another proper blog post update on my progress on Tarvenhive.

Thanks for linking that discussion from Troll Forged. I've had a look at some of Phil's Ecopolis stuff before and although I'm going with a different sort of design philosophy (less emphasis on self sufficiency) it is all feeding into the mix.